Page 3 of Ravaged By the Reaper
I’m six. My mother’s perfume smells like citrus and smoke. She’s crying, but not looking at me.
I’m fifteen, fencing with a Terran Duke’s son, laughing as I beat him again and again.
I’m nine, locked in the Companion transport pod, weeping so hard I throw up
I’m thirteen, and my genetics counselor tells me my DNA isn’t fully legal.
Everything floods me. Out of order. Out of control.
I sob. I gag. I scream again.
The creature tightens its grip.
I see someone, hacking through soldiers, face wild with rage, red eyes blazing like twin suns. He roars, and the sound shakes me even in memory. He’s coming. He’scoming for me. Is it real? Is it now? Did I dream him into being?
“No,” I whimper. “No, no, no?—”
The table shudders. My body thrashes without meaning to. The restraints bite deep.
Malem watches without blinking. “Fascinating,” he whispers.
I fall into blackness. My mind feels stretched, warped, twisted like hot glass. The tendrils pulse. My own memories become strangers. My name doesn’t feel like mine anymore.
When the creature finally retracts, I’m a shaking wreck.
And Malem just smiles.
“We’ll go again in the morning.”
The thing is, pain stops meaning anything after a while. It just becomes a color—bright, hot, endless red. Like the sky over Grolgath Prime. Like the inside of my skull.
I wake to the sour sting of antiseptic and the clink of metal tools being arranged with surgical precision. My skin is slick with cold sweat. My throat tastes like copper and acid.
I don’t remember when I passed out. I do remember the creature unlatching from my face—wet, sucking, its tendrils retreating with obscene slowness. The sensation still lingers like phantom hands on my nerves.
I swallow bile and blink back tears. I will not let this be the last place I see.
Malem is back, seated across from me at a workbench, meticulously cleaning the extractor with a cloth that looks suspiciously like synthetic skin. His movements are precise, obsessive. His fingers tremble, but not from nerves—excitement.
“You’re still alive,” he says without looking up. “Impressive.”
“Screw you,” I rasp. My voice is wrecked. Raw.
He finally looks at me. “That language is beneath your training.”
I breathe in through my nose, deep and slow. Find center. Find stillness. Find the Companion mask andwear it like armor.
“Apologies,” I say, sugar-coating the acid in my tone. “I forget myself.”
He chuckles softly. “Don’t we all, eventually?”
My pulse is a drumbeat in my ears, but underneath it, there’s a rhythm—thought. Calculation. Memory doesn’t just flicker; itfloods—but not in order. The extractor is flawed. It plucks moments from my mind like thorns from a bush. No pattern. No logic.
Maybe I can use that.
I let my head loll to one side. Let my muscles slacken. I moan softly, just enough to sound pathetic, not theatrical.
Malem watches. His expression is maddeningly neutral.
